Aspects of the present invention relate in general to bill of material processing systems, and more particularly, to a method and system for verifying bills of material between two separate systems based on an update to one of the systems.
A bill of material is a list of components and parts needed to manufacture a particular product. For example, to produce products, a company may employ personnel for both an engineering department and a manufacturing department. Engineering departments often use a product development system to manage the products they design and the parts needed to build the products. Manufacturing departments often use a type of enterprise planning system to aid the procurement of materials and machinery to manufacture various products.
The design of a product may often be updated, even if that product is currently being manufactured. The engineering department may make changes to a bill of material for a particular product by issuing an engineering change order (ECO). The change order may indicate a change in materials to be used for a particular range of product serial numbers or date range. Because various changes to a bill of material may issue for different ranges of product serial numbers, it can be difficult to make sure that the bills of material from the engineering department systems match the bills of material from the manufacturing department systems. Additionally, many other types of systems may need to interact with the bill of material. Thus, the complexity of updating and verifying a bill of material between multiple systems may increase.